The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction

By Neil Gaiman and Marlon James

An outstanding array—52 pieces in all—of selected fiction from the multiple-award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, introduced with a foreword by Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James

Spanning Gaiman’s career to date, The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction is a captivating collection from one of the world’s most beloved writers.

A brilliant representation of Gaiman's groundbreaking, entrancing, endlessly imaginative fiction, this captivating volume includes excerpts from each of his five novels for adults —Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane—and nearly fifty of his short stories. 

Impressive in its depth and range, The Neil Gaiman Reader: Selected Fiction is both an entryway to Gaiman’s oeuvre and a literary trove Gaiman readers old and new will return to many times over.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780063031876

Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman (Portchester, 1960), guionista y escritor aclamado unánimemente por la crítica, ha obtenido numerosos galardones, como el World Fantasy Award, el Hugo, el Nebula y el Bram Stoker. Es autor de novelas de fantasía para adultos como American Gods, Neverwhere y Stardust (Premio de la Asociación Americana de Bibliotecas en el año 2000), obras para el público infantil como la celebrada Coraline (Salamandra, 2009), la multipremiada serie de cómics The Sandman, que ha cosechado más de 26 premios Eisner, y varias antologías de relatos cortos, entre las que destacan Humo y espejos y Material sensible, ambas publicadas por Salamandra.

Book preview

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Foreword by Marlon James

Preface

We Can Get Them for You Wholesale (1984)

I, Cthulhu (1986)

Nicholas Was . . . (1989)

Babycakes (1990)

Chivalry (1992)

Murder Mysteries (1992)

Troll Bridge (1993)

Snow, Glass, Apples (1994)

Only the End of the World Again (1994)

Don’t Ask Jack (1995)

Excerpt from Neverwhere (1996)

The Daughter of Owls (1996)

The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories (1996)

The Price (1997)

Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar (1998)

The Wedding Present (1998)

When We Went to See the End of the World by Dawnie Morningside, age 11¼ (1998)

The Facts in the Case of the Departure of Miss Finch (1998)

Changes (1998)

Excerpt from Stardust (1999)

Harlequin Valentine (1999)

Excerpt from American Gods (2001)

Other People (2001)

Strange Little Girls (2001)

October in the Chair (2002)

Closing Time (2002)

A Study in Emerald (2003)

Bitter Grounds (2003)

The Problem of Susan (2004)

Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire (2004)

The Monarch of the Glen (2004)

The Return of the Thin White Duke (2004)

Excerpt from Anansi Boys (2005)

Sunbird (2005)

How to Talk to Girls at Parties (2006)

Feminine Endings (2007)

Orange (2008)

Mythical Creatures (2009)

The Truth Is a Cave in the Black Mountains . . . (2010)

The Thing About Cassandra (2010)

The Case of Death and Honey (2011)

The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury (2012)

Excerpt from The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013)

Click-Clack the Rattlebag (2013)

The Sleeper and the Spindle (2013)

A Calendar of Tales (2013)

Nothing O’Clock (2013)

A Lunar Labyrinth (2013)

Down to a Sunless Sea (2013)

How the Marquis Got His Coat Back (2014)

Black Dog (2015)

Monkey and the Lady (2018)

Honors List

Credits

About the Author

Also by Neil Gaiman

Copyright

About the Publisher

Foreword

Thanks to Neil Gaiman, spiders now stop me dead in my tracks. This is a truly weird turn of events, worthy of one of his novels, that now, instead of trying to shoo them away or smash them, I stand frozen, and wonder if this eight-legged brother is about to tell me something that it’s been trying to share since before the slave ships. Something that I’m only now ready to hear. I would explain more, but that would turn this into a foreword for just one novel, Anansi Boys, when this collection is so much more.

Besides, what brought me here was not spiders, but Tori Amos. This already sounds like the line of a ’90s song, and the line I’m writing about is from 1992, and is actually hers: If you need me, me and Neil’ll be hanging out with the Dream King. The lyric clearly means something to Amos and to Gaiman, but it meant something else to a young obsessive of them both. By that time, I had been reading Neil’s work for years. But that one line made me think Amos had done something else. She went into his work and found herself. I remember hearing that song and thinking, So I’m not the only one who believes in Neil’s world more than my own.

I still think I live in Gaiman’s world more than my own. For us maladjusted misfits, an escape to his worlds was all that enabled us to endure ours. I would say that Gaiman creates the kind of work that begets obsessions, but that seems too easy. All great art has its devotees, but Gaiman, particularly for other writers and oddballs, regardless of genre or art form, gives us permission to never let go of the world of wonder that we’re all told at some time to leave behind. Of course, the best writers know this is a scam—there is no fantasy world standing opposite the real world, because it’s all real. Not allegory, or fable, but real.

Which might explain why I devoured American Gods when it came out in 2001, a year that badly needed an escape into fantasy. Except that escape was not what it gave me. The novel proposed something way more radical: the idea that the forgotten gods were still around, adjusting quite badly to their twilight, and just because we no longer believed in them didn’t mean that they had stopped messing with us. And it wasn’t just the continued machinations of gods, but the continued importance of myths. After all, a myth was a religion once, and a reality before that, and myths still tell us more about ourselves than religion ever could. Neil Gaiman is a mythmaker, but also a dream restorer. It never even occurred to me that I needed a character to be rescued from simply being relegated to folklore, until he took the stuff of childhood rhymes, half-forgotten, and gave them living, breathing, combative souls. Then he threw them into a present that they weren’t always ready for, and certainly wasn’t ready for them.

This collection abounds in fantastic beasts, normal people with weird powers, weird people with normal struggles, worlds above this one, worlds below, and the real world, which is not as real as you might think. Some stories travel through strange realms in three pages. Some don’t end so much as stop, and some don’t begin so much as pause and wait for you to catch up. Some stories take up an entire city, others a bedroom. Some have the stuff of childhood, with very adult consequences, while others show what happens when grown-up people lose what it means to be a child. And then there are some stories that let you off with a warning, while others leave you so arrested that peeling yourself away from them will take days.

There’s more. Toni Morrison once wrote that Tolstoy could never have known that he was writing for a black girl in Lorraine, Ohio. Neil could never have known that he was writing for a confused Jamaican kid who, without even knowing it, was still staggering from centuries of erasure of his own gods and monsters. Sure, myths were religions once, but they are at the core of a people’s and a nation’s identity. So, when I saw Anansi, on the other side of erasure, responding to being rubbed out and forgotten, I found myself wondering who the hell was this man from the UK who had just restored our story. I understood what being taken away from our myths meant for me, but I had never considered what it meant for the myth.

If Gaiman’s comics and graphic novels turned me into one kind of fan, his fiction turned me into another. I envy the person who, by picking up this collection, will be reading Neil for the first time. But on the other hand, people who know all of the Beatles’ songs still pick up compilations, and they do so for a reason. This is an introduction by way of throwing you in the deep end, touching on nearly everything that has sealed Gaiman’s reputation as one of our masters of fantasy. And yet even for the person who’s read quite a bit of his work, there is still much to discover, even in the old stuff. Like I said, there are people who own every album but still buy the greatest hits, and it’s not because of nostalgia.

It’s that by putting these stories beside each other, a curious new narrative emerges: that of the writer. The excerpt from Neverwhere is brilliant enough on its own but sandwiched between Don’t Ask Jack and The Daughter of Owls, all three pieces take on a new dimension. Put together, it’s the theme that becomes the story. The secret lives of children, the world of terror and wonder that we leave them to when we turn off the light and close the door. What happens when the door stays closed. What happens when one world moves on and the other does not. It doesn’t escape the reader that Neverwhere sounds similar to Neverland, another place where a cost is paid when children never grow up. But it does something to you, entering one world still feeling the effects (and bringing the subtext) of the one you have just left behind, taking the fears and wonders of one story to another. Or even better, seeing, as you move through the collection, what keeps Gaiman awake at night.

Other odd things happen in this volume. The way we read certain characters in I, Cthulhu shades how we react to their names cropping up several stories later. Those characters never really appear in the second story, but it doesn’t even matter. They have left such a stamp on our imagination that we barely realize that the dread that comes to the latter story is one we bring to it. The subtext of foreboding, the sense that anything could happen is coming from us. This is what great collections do: recontextualize stories, even the ones you’ve read before, and give you brand new ways to read them. Together, they also reveal aspects of story you might not have been aware of when they were apart. Side-splitting humour, for instance. Humour and horror have always been inseparable bedfellows: horror making humour funnier; humour making horror more horrifying. The opening punch of the story We Can Get Them For You Wholesale is hilarious not just because of how dark and ridiculous it gets, but because it is punctuated by that most British of qualities, cheapness. Just how far are you willing to go, if there’s a bargain to be had? Spoiler: The end of the world.

Maybe a better comparison for this collection is the Beatles’ White Album: massive in size and scope, with individually brilliant pieces presented together because the only context they need is how good they are. In this volume is funny stuff. Scary stuff. Fantasy stuff. Mystery stuff. Ghost stuff. Kid stuff. Stuff you have read, and much that you haven’t. Stories that reinforce all that you know about Neil Gaiman’s work and stories that will confound what you know. It’s tempting to say that the great thing about this or any storyteller is that he never grew up, but that’s not quite it. In fact, when I was a younger, one of the thrills of Gaiman’s work was how it left me feeling so adult for reading them.

Meaning of course that if you’ve read Neil’s work for as long as I have, then you recognize the rather wicked irony that it took worlds of make believe to make you feel grown up. These characters may have powers, see visions, come from imaginary homelands or do weird, wonderful, sometimes horrible things. But they also come loaded with internal troubles, are riddled with personal conflicts, and sometimes live and die (and come back to life) based on the complicated choices they make. And here I used to think that it was the fairies that were simplistic and the people who were complex.

There’s something so very Christian, or rather Protestant, about the idea of dismissing the imagination as a sign of growing up, and as a diligent student of dead social realist writers, I believed it. But realism is speculation too. And if you were a black nerd like me, a white family from an impossibly clean suburb experiencing nothing more than the drama of crushing ennui as they tear their lives apart just by talking about it was as fantastical as Superman.

Being no fan of H. P. Lovecraft I’ve of course saved him for the end. You can’t talk about a modern fantasist without bring Mr. Mountains of Madness into the room, which is funny given how much he would have hated being in any space with so many others not like him. But when I read Neil Gaiman, I don’t see Lovecraft at all, not even in I, Cthulhu. The ghost I see hovering is Borges. Like Jorge Luis, Neil is not writing speculative fiction. He is so given over to these worlds that he has gone beyond speculating about them to living in them. Like Borges, he writes about things as if they have already happened, describes worlds as if we are already living in them, and shares stories as if they are solid truths that he’s just passing along. I don’t think I really believe that in reading great fiction I find myself, so much as I find where I want to be. Because Neil’s stories leave you feeling that his is the world we’ve always lived in, and it’s the real world that is the stuff of make-believe.

Marlon James

Preface

The worst conversations, for me, are normally with taxi drivers.

They say, So what do you do, then? and I say, I write things.

What kind of things?

Um. All sorts, I say, and I sound unconvincing. I can hear it in my voice.

Yeah? What sort of stuff is all sorts, then? Fiction, nonfiction, books, TV?

Yes. That sort of thing.

So, what sort of thing do you write? Fantasy? Mysteries? Science fiction? Literary fiction? Children’s books? Poetry? Reviews? Funny? Scary? What?

All of that, really.

Then the drivers sometimes shoot me a look in the mirror and decide I am taking the mickey, and are quiet, and sometimes they keep going. The next question is always, Anything I’ve heard of?

So, then I list the titles of books I’ve written, and all but one of the taxi drivers who have asked the question have nodded, and said they’ve never actually heard of the books, or me, but they will be sure to look them up. Sometimes they ask how to spell my name. (The one taxi driver who pulled over to the side of the road, then got out of the car and then hugged me and had me sign something for his wife was an anomaly, but one that I really liked.)

And I feel awkward for not being somebody who writes one thing—mysteries, say, or ghost stories. Someone who is easy to explain in taxis.

This is a book for all those taxi drivers. But it’s not just for them. It is a book for anybody who, having asked me what I do, and then having asked me what I write, wants to know what book of mine they should read.

Because the answer for me is always, What kind of things do you like? And then I try and point them at the thing I’ve written that is closest to what they want to read.

In this book you will find short stories, novelettes and novellas, and even some extracts from novels. (You won’t find any comics or criticism, nor will you find essays, screenplays or poetry.)

The stories, short and long, are in here because I’m proud of them, and you can dip into them and dip out again. They cover all kinds of genres and subjects, and mostly what they have in common is that I wrote them. The other thing they have in common is they were chosen by readers on the Internet, when we asked people to vote for the stories they liked best. This meant that I didn’t have to try and choose favorites. I let the votes for individual stories be our guide to what went in here, and I didn’t put my thumb on the scales to add or lose any stories, except for one. It’s a fable called Monkey and the Lady, and I slipped it into this book because it hasn’t been collected anywhere and has only ever appeared in the book it was written for, Dave McKean’s 2017 anthology The Weight of Words. It’s a story I love, very much, although I could not tell you why.

The extracts from novels were harder to choose, and in these I let myself be guided by my beloved editor, Jennifer Brehl. In my head nothing from a novel stands alone, and thus you cannot take extracts from books out of context—except I remember finding a paperback, as a boy, that must have belonged to my father, called A Book of Wit and Humour, edited by Michael Barsley, which mostly consisted of extracts from novels. I still have it. I fell in love with selected passages that then sent me to seek out books I delight in and take pleasure in rereading to this day, like Stella Gibbons’s glorious novel of dark and dreadful Sussex farmhouse doings, Cold Comfort Farm, or Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon’s magical Shakespearian comedy No Bed for Bacon. So perhaps someone reading this will decide, on the basis of the pages presented here, that American Gods or Stardust (to take two very different novels that both happen to have me as an author) might be their cup of tea, and worth investigating further. I’d like that.

The stories in this book are printed in order of publication, not in order of how much people loved them, earliest stories first. You can see me trying to find out who I am as a writer, trying on other people’s hats and glasses and wondering if they suit me, before, eventually, discovering who I had been all along. I encourage you to browse. To start where it suits you, to read whatever tale you feel like reading at that moment.

I love being a writer.

I love being a writer because I’m allowed to do whatever I want, when I write. There aren’t any rules. There aren’t even any guardrails. I can write funny things and sad things, big stories and small. I can write to make you happy or write to chill your blood. I am certain that I would have been a more commercially successful author if I’d just written a book, that was in most ways like the last book, once a year, but it wouldn’t have been half as much fun.

I’ll be sixty soon. I’ve been writing professionally since I was twenty-​two. I hope very much that I have another twenty, perhaps even thirty years of writing left in me; there are so many stories I still want to tell, after all, and it’s starting to feel like, if I just keep going, I may one day have an answer for anyone, even a taxi driver, who wants to know what kind of a writer I am.

I may even find out myself.

If you have been on the road with me all these years, reading these stories and novels as they appeared, thank you. I appreciate it and you. If this is our first encounter, then I hope you find something in these pages that amuses you, distracts you, makes you wonder or makes you think—or that simply makes you want to read on.

Thank you for coming, my reader.

Enjoy yourself.

Neil Gaiman

May 2020

Isle of Skye

We Can Get Them for You Wholesale

1984

PETER PINTER HAD never heard of Aristippus of the Cyrenaics, a lesser-known follower of Socrates who maintained that the avoidance of trouble was the highest attainable good; however, he had lived his uneventful life according to this precept. In all respects except one (an inability to pass up a bargain, and which of us is entirely free from that?), he was a very moderate man. He did not go to extremes. His speech was proper and reserved; he rarely overate; he drank enough to be sociable and no more; he was far from rich and in no wise poor. He liked people and people liked him. Bearing all that in mind, would you expect to find him in a lowlife pub on the seamier side of London’s East End, taking out what is colloquially known as a contract on someone he hardly knew? You would not. You would not even expect to find him in the pub.

And until a certain Friday afternoon, you would have been right. But the love of a woman can do strange things to a man, even one so colorless as Peter Pinter, and the discovery that Miss Gwendolyn Thorpe, twenty-three years of age, of 9, Oaktree Terrace, Purley, was messing about (as the vulgar would put it) with a smooth young gentleman from the accounting department—after, mark you, she had consented to wear an engagement ring, composed of real ruby chips, nine-carat gold, and something that might well have been a diamond (£37.50) that it had taken Peter almost an entire lunch hour to choose—can do very strange things to a man indeed.

After he made this shocking discovery, Peter spent a sleepless Friday night, tossing and turning with visions of Gwendolyn and Archie Gibbons (the Don Juan of the Clamages accounting department) dancing and swimming before his eyes—performing acts that even Peter, if he were pressed, would have to admit were most improbable. But the bile of jealousy had risen up within him, and by the morning Peter had resolved that his rival should be done away with.

Saturday morning was spent wondering how one contacted an assassin, for, to the best of Peter’s knowledge, none were employed by Clamages (the department store that employed all three of the members of our eternal triangle and, incidentally, furnished the ring), and he was wary of asking anyone outright for fear of attracting attention to himself.

Thus it was that Saturday afternoon found him hunting through the Yellow Pages.

ASSASSINS, he found, was not between ASPHALT CONTRACTORS and ASSESSORS (QUANTITY); KILLERS was not between KENNELS and KINDERGARTENS; MURDERERS was not between MOWERS and MUSEUMS. PEST CONTROL looked promising; however closer investigation of the pest control advertisements showed them to be almost solely concerned with rats, mice, fleas, cockroaches, rabbits, moles, and rats (to quote from one that Peter felt was rather hard on rats) and not really what he had in mind. Even so, being of a careful nature, he dutifully inspected the entries in that category, and at the bottom of the second page, in small print, he found a firm that looked promising.

‘Complete discreet disposal of irksome and unwanted mammals, etc.’ went the entry, ‘Ketch, Hare, Burke and Ketch. The Old Firm.’ It went on to give no address, but only a telephone number.

Peter dialed the number, surprising himself by so doing. His heart pounded in his chest, and he tried to look nonchalant. The telephone rang once, twice, three times. Peter was just starting to hope that it would not be answered and he could forget the whole thing when there was a click and a brisk young female voice said, Ketch Hare Burke Ketch. Can I help you?

Carefully not giving his name, Peter said, Er, how big—I mean, what size mammals do you go up to? To, uh, dispose of?

Well, that would all depend on what size sir requires.

He plucked up all his courage. A person?

Her voice remained brisk and unruffled. "Of course, sir. Do you have a pen and paper handy? Good. Be at the Dirty Donkey pub, off Little Courtney Street, E3, tonight at eight o’clock. Carry a rolled-up copy of the Financial Times—that’s the pink one, sir—and our operative will approach you there." Then she put down the phone.

Peter was elated. It had been far easier than he had imagined. He went down to the newsagent’s and bought a copy of the Financial Times, found Little Courtney Street in his A–Z of London, and spent the rest of the afternoon watching football on the television and imagining the smooth young gentleman from accounting’s funeral.

IT TOOK PETER a while to find the pub. Eventually he spotted the pub sign, which showed a donkey and was indeed remarkably dirty.

The Dirty Donkey was a small and more or less filthy pub, poorly lit, in which knots of unshaven people wearing dusty donkey jackets stood around eyeing each other suspiciously, eating crisps and drinking pints of Guinness, a drink that Peter had never cared for. Peter held his Financial Times under one arm as conspicuously as he could, but no one approached him, so he bought a half of shandy and retreated to a corner table. Unable to think of anything else to do while waiting, he tried to read the paper, but, lost and confused by a maze of grain futures and a rubber company that was selling something or other short (quite what the short somethings were he could not tell), he gave it up and stared at the door.

He had waited almost ten minutes when a small busy man hustled in, looked quickly around him, then came straight over to Peter’s table and sat down.

He stuck out his hand. Kemble. Burton Kemble of Ketch Hare Burke Ketch. I hear you have a job for us.

He didn’t look like a killer. Peter said so.

Oh, lor’ bless us, no. I’m not actually part of our workforce, sir. I’m in sales.

Peter nodded. That certainly made sense. Can we—er—talk freely here?

Sure. Nobody’s interested. Now then, how many people would you like disposed of?

Only one. His name’s Archibald Gibbons and he works in Clamages accounting department. His address is . . .

Kemble interrupted. We can go into all that later, sir, if you don’t mind. Let’s just quickly go over the financial side. First of all, the contract will cost you five hundred pounds . . .

Peter nodded. He could afford that and in fact had expected to have to pay a little more.

. . . although there’s always the special offer, Kemble concluded smoothly.

Peter’s eyes shone. As I mentioned earlier, he loved a bargain and often bought things he had no imaginable use for in sales or on special offers. Apart from this one failing (one that so many of us share), he was a most moderate young man. Special offer?

Two for the price of one, sir.

Mmm. Peter thought about it. That worked out at only £250 each, which couldn’t be bad no matter how you looked at it. There was only one snag. "I’m afraid I don’t have anyone else I want killed."

Kemble looked disappointed. That’s a pity, sir. For two we could probably have even knocked the price down to, well, say four hundred and fifty pounds for the both of them.

Really?

Well, it gives our operatives something to do, sir. If you must know—and here he dropped his voice—"there really isn’t enough work in this particular line to keep them occupied. Not like the old days. Isn’t there just one other person you’d like to see dead?

"Peter pondered. He hated to pass up a bargain, but couldn’t for the life of him think of anyone else. He liked people. Still, a bargain was a bargain . . .

Look, said Peter. Could I think about it and see you here tomorrow night?

The salesman looked pleased. Of course, sir, he said. I’m sure you’ll be able to think of someone.

The answer—the obvious answer—came to Peter as he was drifting off to sleep that night. He sat straight up in bed, fumbled the bedside light on, and wrote a name down on the back of an envelope, in case he forgot it. To tell the truth, he didn’t think that he could forget it, for it was painfully obvious, but you can never tell with these late-night thoughts.

The name that he had written down on the back of the envelope was this: Gwendolyn Thorpe.

He turned the light off, rolled over, and was soon asleep, dreaming peaceful and remarkably unmurderous dreams.

KEMBLE WAS WAITING for him when he arrived in the Dirty Donkey on Sunday night. Peter bought a drink and sat down beside him.

I’m taking you up on the special offer, he said by way of greeting.

Kemble nodded vigorously. A very wise decision, if you don’t mind me saying so, sir.

Peter Pinter smiled modestly, in the manner of one who read the Financial Times and made wise business decisions. That will be four hundred and fifty pounds, I believe?

Did I say four hundred and fifty pounds, sir? Good gracious me, I do apologize. I beg your pardon, I was thinking of our bulk rate. It would be four hundred and seventy-five pounds for two people.

Disappointment mingled with cupidity on Peter’s bland and youthful face. That was an extra £25. However, something that Kemble had said caught his attention.

Bulk rate?

Of course, but I doubt that sir would be interested in that.

No, no, I am. Tell me about it.

Very well, sir. Bulk rate, four hundred and fifty pounds, would be for a large job. Ten people.

Peter wondered if he had heard correctly. Ten people? But that’s only forty-five pounds each.

Yes, sir. It’s the large order that makes it profitable.

I see, said Peter, and Hmm, said Peter, and Could you be here the same time tomorrow night?

Of course, sir.

Upon arriving home, Peter got out a scrap of paper and a pen. He wrote the numbers one to ten down one side and then filled it in as follows:

1. . . . Archie G.

2. . . . Gwennie.

3. . . .

and so forth.

Having filled in the first two, he sat sucking his pen, hunting for wrongs done to him and people the world would be better off without.

He smoked a cigarette. He strolled around the room.

Aha! There was a physics teacher at a school he had attended who had delighted in making his life a misery. What was the man’s name again? And for that matter, was he still alive? Peter wasn’t sure, but he wrote The Physics Teacher, Abbot Street Secondary School next to the number three. The next came more easily—his department head had refused to raise his salary a couple of months back; that the raise had eventually come was immaterial. Mr. Hunterson was number four.

When he was five, a boy named Simon Ellis had poured paint on his head while another boy named James somebody-or-other had held him down and a girl named Sharon Hartsharpe had laughed. They were numbers five through seven, respectively.

Who else?

There was the man on television with the annoying snicker who read the news. He went on the list. And what about the woman in the flat next door with the little yappy dog that shat in the hall? He put her and the dog down on nine. Ten was the hardest. He scratched his head and went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee, then dashed back and wrote My Great-Uncle Mervyn down in the tenth place. The old man was rumored to be quite affluent, and there was a possibility (albeit rather slim) that he could leave Peter some money.

With the satisfaction of an evening’s work well done, he went off to bed.

Monday at Clamages was routine; Peter was a senior sales assistant in the books department, a job that actually entailed very little. He clutched his list tightly in his hand, deep in his pocket, rejoicing in the feeling of power that it gave him. He spent a most enjoyable lunch hour in the canteen with young Gwendolyn (who did not know that he had seen her and Archie enter the stockroom together) and even smiled at the smooth young man from the accounting department when he passed him in the corridor.

He proudly displayed his list to Kemble that evening.

The little salesman’s face fell.

I’m afraid this isn’t ten people, Mr. Pinter, he explained. "You’ve counted the woman in the next-door flat and her dog as one person. That brings it to eleven, which would be an extra—his pocket calculator was rapidly deployed—an extra seventy pounds. How about if we forget the dog?"

Peter shook his head. The dog’s as bad as the woman. Or worse.

Then I’m afraid we have a slight problem. Unless . . .

What?

Unless you’d like to take advantage of our wholesale rate. But of course sir wouldn’t be . . .

There are words that do things to people; words that make people’s faces flush with joy, excitement, or passion. Environmental can be one; occult is another. Wholesale was Peter’s. He leaned back in his chair. Tell me about it, he said with the practiced assurance of an experienced shopper.

Well, sir, said Kemble, allowing himself a little chuckle, "we can, uh, get them for you wholesale, seventeen pounds fifty each, for every quarry after the first fifty, or a tenner each for every one over two hundred."

I suppose you’d go down to a fiver if I wanted a thousand people knocked off?

Oh no, sir, Kemble looked shocked. If you’re talking those sorts of figures, we can do them for a quid each.

"One pound?"

That’s right, sir. There’s not a big profit margin on it, but the high turnover and productivity more than justifies it.

Kemble got up. Same time tomorrow, sir?

Peter nodded.

One thousand pounds. One thousand people. Peter Pinter didn’t even know a thousand people. Even so . . . there were the Houses of Parliament. He didn’t like politicians; they squabbled and argued and carried on so.

And for that matter . . .

An idea, shocking in its audacity. Bold. Daring. Still, the idea was there and it wouldn’t go away. A distant cousin of his had married the younger brother of an earl or a baron or something . . .

On the way home from work that afternoon, he stopped off at a little shop that he had passed a thousand times without entering. It had a large sign in the window—guaranteeing to trace your lineage for you and even draw up a coat of arms if you happened to have mislaid your own—and an impressive heraldic map.

They were very helpful and phoned him up just after seven to give him their news.

If approximately fourteen million, seventy-two thousand, eight hundred and eleven people died, he, Peter Pinter, would be King of England.

He didn’t have fourteen million, seventy-two thousand, eight hundred and eleven pounds: but he suspected that when you were talking in those figures, Mr. Kemble would have one of his special discounts.

MR. KEMBLE DID.

He didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

Actually, he explained, it works out quite cheaply; you see, we wouldn’t have to do them all individually. Small-scale nuclear weapons, some judicious bombing, gassing, plague, dropping radios in swimming pools, and then mopping up the stragglers. Say four thousand pounds.

"Four thou—? That’s incredible!"

The salesman looked pleased with himself. Our operatives will be glad of the work, sir. He grinned. We pride ourselves on servicing our wholesale customers.

The wind blew cold as Peter left the pub, setting the old sign swinging. It didn’t look much like a dirty donkey, thought Peter. More like a pale horse.

Peter was drifting off to sleep that night, mentally rehearsing his coronation speech, when a thought drifted into his head and hung around. It would not go away. Could he—could he possibly be passing up an even larger saving than he already had? Could he be missing out on a bargain?

Peter climbed out of bed and walked over to the phone. It was almost 3 A.M., but even so . . .

His Yellow Pages lay open where he had left it the previous Saturday, and he dialed the number.

The phone seemed to ring forever. There was a click and a bored voice said, Burke Hare Ketch. Can I help you?

I hope I’m not phoning too late . . . he began.

Of course not, sir.

I was wondering if I could speak to Mr. Kemble.

Can you hold? I’ll see if he’s available.

Peter waited for a couple of minutes, listening to the ghostly crackles and whispers that always echo down empty phone lines.

Are you there, caller?

Yes, I’m here.

Putting you through. There was a buzz, then Kemble speaking.

Ah, Mr. Kemble. Hello. Sorry if I got you out of bed or anything. This is, um, Peter Pinter.

Yes, Mr. Pinter?

Well, I’m sorry it’s so late, only I was wondering . . . How much would it cost to kill everybody? Everybody in the world?

Everybody? All the people?

Yes. How much? I mean, for an order like that, you’d have to have some kind of a big discount. How much would it be? For everyone?

Nothing at all, Mr. Pinter.

You mean you wouldn’t do it?

I mean we’d do it for nothing, Mr. Pinter. We only have to be asked, you see. We always have to be asked.

Peter was puzzled. But—when would you start?

"Start? Right away. Now. We’ve been ready for a long time. But we had to be asked, Mr. Pinter. Good night. It has been a pleasure doing business with you."

The line went dead.

Peter felt strange. Everything seemed very distant. He wanted to sit down. What on earth had the man meant? We always have to be asked. It was definitely strange. Nobody does anything for nothing in this world; he had a good mind to phone Kemble back and call the whole thing off. Perhaps he had overreacted, perhaps there was a perfectly innocent reason why Archie and Gwendolyn had entered the stockroom together. He would talk to her; that’s what he’d do. He’d talk to Gwennie first thing tomorrow morning . . .

That was when the noises started.

Odd cries from across the street. A catfight? Foxes probably. He hoped someone would throw a shoe at them. Then, from the corridor outside his flat, he heard a muffled clumping, as if someone were dragging something very heavy along the floor. It stopped. Someone knocked on his door, twice, very softly.

Outside his window the cries were getting louder. Peter sat in his chair, knowing that somehow, somewhere, he had missed something. Something important. The knocking redoubled. He was thankful that he always locked and chained his door at night.

They’d been ready for a long time, but they had to be asked . .

WHEN THE THING came through the door, Peter started screaming, but he really didn’t scream for very long.

I, Cthulhu

1986

I.

CTHULHU, THEY CALL ME. Great Cthulhu. Nobody can pronounce it right.

Are you writing this down? Every word? Good. Where shall I start—mm? Very well, then. The beginning. Write this down, Whateley.

I was spawned uncounted aeons ago, in the dark mists of Khhaa’yngnaiih (no, of course I don’t know how to spell it. Write it as it sounds), of nameless nightmare parents, under a gibbous moon. It wasn’t the moon of this planet, of course, it was a real moon. On some nights it filled over half the sky and as it rose you could watch the crimson blood drip and trickle down its bloated face, staining it red, until at its height it bathed the swamps and towers in a gory dead red light.

Those were the days.

Or rather the nights, on the whole. Our place had a sun of sorts, but it was old, even back then. I remember that on the night it finally exploded we all slithered down to the beach to watch. But I get ahead of myself.

I never knew my parents.

My father was consumed by my mother as soon as he had fertilized her and she, in her turn, was eaten by myself at my birth. That is my first memory, as it happens. Squirming my way out of my mother, the gamy taste of her still in my tentacles.

Don’t look so shocked, Whateley. I find you humans just as revolting.

Which reminds me, did they remember to feed the shoggoth? I thought I heard it gibbering.

I spent my first few thousand years in those swamps. I did not like this, of course, for I was the color of a young trout and about four of your feet long. I spent most of my time creeping up on things and eating them and in my turn avoiding being crept up on and eaten.

So passed my youth.

And then one day—I believe it was a Tuesday—I discovered that there was more to life than food. (Sex? Of course not. I will not reach that stage until after my next estivation; your piddly little planet will long be cold by then). It was that Tuesday that my Uncle Hastur slithered down to my part of the swamp with his jaws fused.

It meant that he did not intend to dine that visit, and that we could talk.

Now, that is a stupid question, even for you, Whateley. I don’t use either of my mouths in communicating with you, do I? Very well then. One more question like that and I’ll find someone else to relate my memoirs to. And you will be feeding the shoggoth.

We are going out, said Hastur to me. Would you like to accompany us?

We? I asked him. Who’s we?

Myself, he said, Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Tsathoggua, Iä! Shub-Niggurath, young Yuggoth and a few others. You know, he said, the boys. (I am freely translating for you here, Whateley, you understand. Most of them were a-, bi-, or trisexual, and old Iä! Shub Niggurath has at least a thousand young, or so it says. That branch of the family was always given to exaggeration.) We are going out, he concluded, and we were wondering if you fancied some fun.

I did not answer him at once. To tell the truth I wasn’t all that fond of my cousins, and due to some particularly eldritch distortion of the planes I’ve always had a great deal of trouble seeing them clearly. They tend to get fuzzy around the edges, and some of them—Sabaoth is a case in point—have a great many edges.

But I was young, I craved excitement. There has to be more to life than this! I would cry, as the delightfully fetid charnel smells of the swamp miasmatized around me, and overhead the ngau-ngau and zitadors whooped and skrarked. I said yes, as you have probably guessed, and I oozed after Hastur until we reached the meeting place.

As I remember we spent the next moon discussing where we were going. Azathoth had his hearts set on distant Shaggai, and Nyarlathotep had a thing about the Unspeakable Place (I can’t for the life of me think why. The last time I was there everything was shut). It was all the same to me, Whateley. Anywhere wet and somehow, subtly wrong and I feel at home. But Yog-Sothoth had the last word, as he always does, and we came to this plane.

You’ve met Yog-Sothoth, have you not, my little two-legged beastie? I thought as much.

He opened the way for us to come here.

To be honest, I didn’t think much of it. Still don’t. If I’d known the trouble we were going to have I doubt I’d have bothered. But I was younger then.

As I remember our first stop was dim Carcosa. Scared the shit out of me, that place. These days I can look at your kind without a shudder, but all those people, without a scale or pseudopod between them, gave me the quivers.

The King in Yellow was the first I ever got on with.

The tatterdemalion king. You don’t know of him? Necronomicon page seven hundred and four (of the complete edition) hints at his existence, and I think that idiot Prinn mentions him in De Vermis Mysteriis. And then there’s Chambers, of course.

Lovely fellow, once I got used to him.

He was the one who first gave me the idea.

What the unspeakable hells is there to do in this dreary dimension? I asked him.

He laughed. When I first came here, he said, a mere color out of space, I asked myself the same question. Then I discovered the fun one can get in conquering these odd worlds, subjugating the inhabitants, getting them to fear and worship you. It’s a real laugh.

Of course, the Old Ones don’t like it.

The old ones? I asked.

No, he said, Old Ones. It’s capitalized. Funny chaps. Like huge starfish-headed barrels, with filmy great wings that they fly through space with.

Fly through space? Fly? I was shocked. I didn’t think anybody flew these days. Why bother when one can sluggle, eh? I could see why they called them the old ones. Pardon, Old Ones.

What do these Old Ones do? I asked the King.

(I’ll tell you all about sluggling later, Whateley. Pointless, though. You lack wnaisngh’ang. Although perhaps badminton equipment would do almost as well.) (Where was I? Oh yes.)

What do these Old Ones do, I asked the King.

Nothing much, he explained. They just don’t like anybody else doing it.

I undulated, writhing my tentacles as if to say I have met such beings in my time, but fear the message was lost on the King.

Do you know of any places ripe for conquering? I asked him.

He waved a hand vaguely in the direction of a small and dreary patch of stars. There’s one over there that you might like, he told me. It’s called Earth. Bit off the beaten track, but lots of room to move.

Silly bugger.

That’s all for now, Whateley.

Tell someone to feed the shoggoth on your way out.

II.

IS IT TIME ALREADY, Whateley?

Don’t be silly. I know that I sent for you. My memory is as good as it ever was. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fthagn.

You know what that means, don’t you?

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

A justified exaggeration, that; I haven’t been feeling too well recently.

It was a joke, one-head, a joke. Are you writing all this down? Good. Keep writing. I know where we got up to yesterday.

R’lyeh.

Earth.

That’s an example of the way that languages change, the meanings of words. Fuzziness. I can’t stand it. Once on a time R’lyeh was the Earth, or at least the part of it that I ran, the wet bits at the start. Now it’s just my little house here, latitude 47 9’ south, longitude 126 43’ west.

Or the Old Ones. They call us the Old Ones now. Or the Great Old Ones, as if there were no difference between us and the barrel boys.

Fuzziness.

So I came to Earth, and in those days it was a lot wetter than it is today. A wonderful place it was, the seas as rich as soup and I got on wonderfully with the people. Dagon and the boys (I use the word literally this time). We all lived in the water in those far-off times, and before you could say Cthulhu fthagn I had them building and slaving and cooking. And being cooked, of course.

Which reminds me, there was something I meant to tell you. A true story.

There was a ship, a-sailing on the seas. On a Pacific cruise. And on this ship was a magician, a conjurer, whose function was to entertain the passengers. And there was this parrot on the ship.

Every time the magician did a trick the parrot would ruin it. How? He’d tell them how it was done, that’s how. He put it up his sleeve, the parrot would squawk. Or he’s stacked the deck or it’s got a false bottom.

The magician didn’t like it.

Finally the time came for him to do his biggest trick.

He announced it.

He rolled up his sleeves.

He waved his arms.

At that moment the ship bucked and smashed over to one side.

Sunken R’lyeh had risen beneath them. Hordes of my servants, loathsome fish-men, swarmed over the sides, seized the passengers and crew and dragged them beneath the waves. R’lyeh sank below the waters once more, awaiting that time when dread Cthulhu shall rise and reign once more.

Alone, above the foul waters, the magician—overlooked by my little batrachian boobies, for which they paid heavily—floated, clinging to a spar, all alone. And then, far above him he noticed a small green shape. It came lower, finally perching on a lump of nearby driftwood, and he saw it was the parrot.

The parrot cocked its head to one side and squinted up at the magician. Alright, it says, I give up. How did you do it?

Of course it’s a true story, Whateley.

Would black Cthulhu, who slimed out of the dark stars when your most eldritch nightmares were suckling at their mothers’ pseudomammaria, who waits for the time that the stars come right to come forth from his tomb-palace, revive the faithful and resume his rule, who waits to teach anew the high and luscious pleasures of death and revelry, would he lie to you?

Sure I would.

Shut up Whateley, I’m talking. I don’t care where you heard it before.

We had fun in those days. Carnage and destruction, sacrifice and damnation, ichor and slime and ooze, and foul and nameless games. Food and fun. It was one long party, and everybody loved it except those who found themselves impaled on wooden stakes between a chunk of cheese and pineapple.

Oh, there were giants on the earth in those days.

It couldn’t last forever.

Down from the skies they came, with filmy wings and rules and regulations and routines and Dho-Hna knows how many forms to be filled out in quintuplicate. Banal little bureaucruds, the lot of them. You could see it just looking at them: Five-pointed heads—every one you looked at had five points, arms whatever, on their heads (which I might add were always in the same place). None of them had the imagination to grow three arms or six, or one hundred and two. Five, every time.

No offense meant.

We didn’t get on.

They didn’t like my party.

They rapped on the walls (metaphorically). We paid no attention. Then they got mean.

Argued. Bitched. Fought.

Okay, we said, you want the sea, you can have the sea. Lock, stock, and starfish-headed barrel. We moved onto the land—it was pretty swampy back then—and we built Gargantuan monolithic structures that dwarfed the mountains.

You know what killed off the dinosaurs, Whateley? We did. In one barbecue.

But those pointy-headed killjoys couldn’t leave well enough alone. They tried to move the planet nearer the sun—or was it further away? I never actually asked them. Next thing I knew we were under the sea again.

You had to laugh.

The city of the Old Ones got it in the neck. They hated the dry and the cold, as did their creatures. All of a sudden they were in the Antarctic, dry as a bone and cold as the lost plains of thrice-accursed Leng.

Here endeth the lesson for today, Whateley.

And will you please get somebody to feed that blasted shoggoth?

III.

(Professors Armitage and Wilmarth are both convinced that not less than three pages are missing from the manuscript at this point, citing the text and length. I concur.)

The stars changed, Whateley.

Imagine your body cut away from your head, leaving you a lump of flesh on a chill marble slab, blinking and choking. That was what it was like. The party was over.

It killed us.

So we wait here below. Dreadful, eh?

Not at all. I don’t give a nameless dread. I can wait.

I sit here, dead and dreaming, watching the ant-empires of man rise and fall, tower and crumble.

One day—perhaps it will come tomorrow, perhaps in more tomorrows than your feeble mind can encompass—the stars will be rightly conjoined in the heavens, and the time of destruction shall be upon us: I shall rise from the deep and I shall have dominion over the world once more.

Riot and revel, blood-food and foulness, eternal twilight and nightmare and the screams of the dead and the not-dead and the chant of the faithful.

And after?

I shall leave this plane, when this world is a cold cinder orbiting a lightless sun. I shall return to my own place, where the blood drips nightly down the face of a moon that bulges like the eye of a drowned sailor, and I shall estivate.

Then I shall mate, and in the end I shall feel a stirring within me, and I shall feel my little one eating its way out into the light.

Um.

Are you writing this all down, Whateley? Good.

Well, that’s all. The end. Narrative concluded.

Guess what we’re going to do now? That’s right.

We’re going to feed the shoggoth.

Nicholas Was . . .

1989

OLDER THAN SIN, and his beard could grow no whiter. He wanted to die.

The dwarfish natives of the Arctic caverns did not speak his language, but conversed in their own, twittering tongue, conducted incomprehensible rituals, when they were not actually working in the factories.

Once every year they forced him, sobbing and protesting, into Endless Night. During the journey he would stand near every child in the world, leave one of the dwarves’ invisible gifts by its bedside. The children slept, frozen into time.

He envied Prometheus and Loki, Sisyphus and Judas. His punishment was harsher.

Ho.

Ho.

Ho.

Babycakes

1990

A FEW YEARS BACK all the animals went away.

We woke up one morning, and they just weren’t there anymore.

They didn’t even leave us a note, or say good-bye. We never figured out quite where they’d gone.

We missed them.

Some of us thought that the world had ended, but it hadn’t. There just weren’t any more animals. No cats or rabbits, no dogs or whales, no fish in the seas, no birds in the skies.

We were all alone.

We didn’t know what to do.

We wandered around lost, for a time, and then someone pointed out that just because we didn’t have animals anymore, that was no reason to change our lives. No reason to change our diets or to cease testing products that might cause us harm.

After all, there were still babies.

Babies can’t talk. They can hardly move. A baby is not a rational, thinking creature.

We made babies.

And we used them.

Some of them we ate. Baby flesh is tender and succulent.

We flayed their skin and decorated ourselves in it. Baby leather is soft and comfortable.

Some of them we tested.

We taped open their eyes, dripped detergents and shampoos in, a drop at a time.

We scarred them and scalded them. We burnt them. We clamped them and planted electrodes into their brains. We grafted, and we froze, and we irradiated.

The babies breathed our smoke, and the babies’ veins flowed with our medicines and drugs, until they stopped breathing or until their blood ceased to flow.

It was hard, of course, but it was necessary. No one could deny that.

With the animals gone, what else could we do?

Some people complained, of course. But then, they always do.

And everything went back to normal.

Only . . .

Yesterday, all the babies were gone.

We don’t know where they went. We didn’t even see them go.

We don’t know what we’re going to do without them.

But we’ll think of something. Humans are smart. It’s what makes us superior to the animals and the babies.

We’ll figure something out.

Chivalry

1992

MRS. WHITAKER FOUND the Holy Grail; it was under a fur coat. Every Thursday afternoon Mrs. Whitaker walked down to the post office to collect her pension, even though her legs were no longer what they were, and on the way back home she would stop in at the Oxfam Shop and buy herself a little something.

The Oxfam Shop sold old clothes, knickknacks, oddments, bits and bobs, and large quantities of old paperbacks, all of them donations: secondhand flotsam, often the house clearances of the dead. All the profits went to charity.

The shop was staffed by volunteers. The volunteer on duty this afternoon was Marie, seventeen, slightly overweight, and dressed in a baggy mauve jumper that looked like she had bought it from the shop.

Marie sat by the till with a copy of Modern Woman magazine, filling out a Reveal Your Hidden Personality questionnaire. Every now and then, she’d flip to the back of the magazine and check the relative points assigned to an A), B), or C) answer before making up her mind how she’d respond to the question.

Mrs. Whitaker puttered around the shop.

They still hadn’t sold the stuffed cobra, she noted. It had been there for six months now, gathering dust, glass eyes gazing balefully at the clothes racks and the cabinet filled with chipped porcelain and chewed toys.

Mrs. Whitaker patted its head as she went past.

She picked out a couple of Mills & Boon novels from a bookshelf—Her Thundering Soul and Her Turbulent Heart, a shilling each—and gave careful consideration to the empty bottle of Mateus Rosé with a decorative lampshade on it before deciding she really didn’t have anywhere to put it.

She moved a rather threadbare fur coat, which smelled badly of mothballs. Underneath it was a walking stick and a water-stained copy of Romance and Legend of Chivalry by A. R. Hope Moncrieff, priced at five pence. Next to the book, on its side, was the Holy Grail. It had a little round paper sticker on the base, and written on it, in felt pen, was the price: 30p.

Mrs. Whitaker picked up the dusty silver goblet and appraised it through her thick spectacles.

This is nice, she called to Marie.

Marie shrugged.

It’d look nice on the mantelpiece. Marie shrugged again.

Mrs. Whitaker gave fifty pence to Marie, who gave her ten pence change and a brown paper bag to put the books and the Holy Grail in. Then she went next door to the butcher’s and bought herself a nice piece of liver. Then she went home.

The inside of the goblet was thickly coated with a brownish-red dust. Mrs. Whitaker washed it out with great care, then left it to soak for an hour in warm water with a dash of vinegar added.

Then she polished it with metal polish until it gleamed, and she put it on the mantelpiece in her parlor, where it sat between a small soulful china basset hound and a photograph of her late husband, Henry, on the beach at Frinton in 1953.

She had been right: It did look nice.

For dinner that evening she had the liver fried in breadcrumbs with onions. It was very nice.

The next morning was Friday; on alternate Fridays Mrs. Whitaker and Mrs. Greenberg would visit each other. Today it was Mrs. Greenberg’s turn to visit Mrs. Whitaker. They sat in the parlor and ate macaroons and drank tea. Mrs. Whitaker took one sugar in her tea, but Mrs. Greenberg took sweetener, which she always carried in her handbag in a small plastic container.

That’s nice, said Mrs. Greenberg, pointing to the Grail. What is it?

It’s the Holy Grail, said Mrs. Whitaker. It’s the cup that Jesus drunk out of at the Last Supper. Later, at the Crucifixion, it caught His precious blood when the centurion’s spear pierced His side.

Mrs. Greenberg sniffed. She was small and Jewish and didn’t hold with unsanitary things. I wouldn’t know about that, she said, but it’s very nice. Our Myron got one just like that when he won the swimming tournament, only it’s got his name on the side.

Is he still with that nice girl? The hairdresser?

Bernice? Oh yes. They’re thinking of getting engaged, said Mrs. Greenberg.

That’s nice, said Mrs. Whitaker. She took another macaroon.

Mrs. Greenberg baked her own macaroons and brought them over every alternate Friday: small sweet light brown biscuits with almonds on top.

They talked about Myron and Bernice, and Mrs. Whitaker’s nephew Ronald (she had had no children), and about their friend Mrs. Perkins who was in

Reviews for The Neil Gaiman Reader

[kslade-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great collection of fantasy and other stories, most of which I had not read before. Black Dog is a tingly ghost story. Some remind me of Ray Bradbury. Even has a good Dr Who story. Read it!

[iudita_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't always love everything that Neil Gaiman writes but I admire him so much as a writer. Some of it just isn't my taste but I have also loved many of his books and short stories. His work is incredibly diverse and creative. Such a talented man! And listening to him narrate his own work in his pitch-perfect Gaiman voice is a real pleasure.